


yellow highway lines (that you’re relying on to lead you home)

by renquise



Category: Motorcity
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-10
Updated: 2013-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-25 01:24:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/633603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Detroit to San Francisco is 2,800 miles, give or take a few detours, blown-out tires, Journey mixtapes, and mutant bears roaming the post-apocalyptic wasteland.</p>
            </blockquote>





	yellow highway lines (that you’re relying on to lead you home)

Rayon was a pretty level-headed kind of guy, but occasionally, Mike could see why he and the Duke once got along so well. Now, for instance.

“Come again?” Mike said. He was pretty sure he heard right, but maybe Chuck’s dire warnings about hearing loss due to proximity to massive engines had finally come true. 

“A delivery,” Rayon repeated, enunciating carefully. 

“Yeah, no, I got that part,” Mike said.

“It’s the part about the destination of the delivery that we’re, uh, having trouble with,” Chuck piped in, laughing nervously. Oh, good, Mike wasn’t the only one having hearing problems.

“Roundabout San Fran,” Rayon repeated, looking as calm and collected as ever and certainly not like someone who had just suggested delivering a package to the other side of a barren radioactive wasteland.

“Right. Well, it’s been good talking to you, Rayon. Give me a shout when you’ve got something a little closer. The moon, maybe! I’ve always wanted to outfit Mutt with some rocket boosters,” Mike said with a laugh, reaching to roll up his window.

“You don’t think I’m serious?” Rayon said mildly, looking at them over his glasses and raising his eyebrows.

“...Are you?” Mike said, looking at Rayon. 

Rayon met his glance and put a hand out. The sharp-dressed accomplice at his side placed a package into his hand. It was about the size of a shoebox, wrapped in butcher paper and tied with twine: thoroughly non-descript and just the kind of package that contained carefully-packed trouble, in Mike’s experience.

As with most kinds of trouble, Mike just rolled with it.

“We miiight have to renegotiate our usual rates,” he ventured.

“No problem,” Rayon said. 

Beside him, Chuck gave this little meeping noise (a relatively mild 2.3 on the co-pilot panic scale). Out of the corner of his eye, Mike could see him doing the “abort, Mikey, abort,” gesture, but he didn’t really mean it yet, so Mike ploughed on.

“This it?” Mike said, putting his hand out for the package. 

“Yep,” Rayon said.

Chuck had now graduated to signing, ‘god freaking dammit, Mikey, if you don’t abort, I will throw myself out of this car, effective immediately, and you will feel horribly guilty about it and have to seek solace in Texas’s manly comforting embrace, and everyone will regret that in the morning when Jacob finds out that the vintage portion of his homebrew has gone missing.’

Chuck was very eloquent in his gesturing.

Rayon dropped the package in Mike’s hand. It didn’t weigh much for its size, nor did it rattle when Mike shook it lightly, and it made Mike really, really curious.

“What is it?” he asked.

By now, Chuck had given up on elaborate sign language, throwing up his hands in the universal gesture of ‘I completely and utterly give up on this dude,’ and slumping down in his seat. 

“A gift, if customs wants to know,” Rayon said, the corner of his mouth curling up (ha, customs, very funny). “The coordinates for the exact delivery point are written on there.”

Mike turned the package over, and sure enough, there they were. He didn’t know his geography that well, but even he could tell that it was nowhere near Detroit.

Chuck glanced over at the package, curiosity winning out over self-preservation. A few screens popped up and a red target planted itself—all the way over on the western edge of the map. Chuck slumped even further down in his seat, poking at his screens as if the map could be convinced to realign itself to somewhere more reasonable, or at least marginally less death-defying.

“So, what’s it going to be?” Rayon said. He was already back in his car, leaning out the window, well-aware that Mike had already been sold from the moment he took the package. 

Mike grinned at him. “You know me way too well. We’ll take it.”

“Excellent. We can negotiate terms later, if you like,” Rayon offered. 

Mike nodded in response. Julie should be able to get them a pretty darn good rate for this, once she digested the initial shock.

Chuck let out a resigned whimper that sounded a lot like, “I hate you so much.”

Mike patted his head and tossed him the package.

—

Texas, at least, didn’t look at him like he had misplaced his brain and a few dozen marbles in the bend of a particularly sharp turn. 

“Rrrrrroad trip, aw yeah!” he said, punching the air. “Don’t worry, guys, I’ll make us a kick-butt roadtrip mix for all of us to listen to. Now, the question is, how much Journey do you guys want on there? Ha ha, just kidding, the only answer to that is ‘a whole lot.’”

“Do you even realize the things that they say are out there? Packs of roving beasts and who knows what else!” said the pile of maps at Mike’s side, in a tone that was trying very hard to stay even and reasonable. 

“Bears,” Texas said.

He thought that one over for a second.

“Mutant bears,” Texas clarified. “I could take ‘em.”

Chuck poked his head out of the maps, his screens surrounding him like a high-tech pillow fort. “The bears aren’t the problem! Well, yeah, they’re a problem, but they’re not _the_ problem. The problem is—are—the miles and miles and did I mention more miles of still-glowing wasteland. You can’t punch radioactivity out of most of the southwest, Texas,” he said, forestalling the inevitable follow-up.

Texas looked utterly unperturbed, already lost in his contemplation of which version of “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” should be on the mix.

Mike located Chuck’s shoulder under a coffee-stained map of former Iowa and patted it consolingly. Chuck accepted the pat, but gave him a narrow-eyed look that said, “don’t think you’re off the hook for getting us into this in the first place, buster.” 

Jacob leaned over the counter to look over Chuck’s shoulder. “It’s not as bad as you would think, actually. It’s just a matter of choosing your route.”

“Not you, too,” Chuck said, looking betrayed. “All these years we’ve known each other, and it’s only now that you’re revealing that you’re missing some basic survival know-how like ‘avoid anything that registers above “oh god no” on the Geiger counter’?”

“It’s been done before,” Jacob said, unruffled. “It’s been awhile, sure, and most people that leave tend to not come back—“

“You do realize how ominous that sounds, right,” Dutch said.

“Because they settle out there, boy, let me get a sentence out,” Jacob finished.

Not everyone who left Deluxe stayed down in Motorcity. Some people left the city limits and just kept on going, only stopping until the white, gleaming buildings were no more than a distant speck. 

Mike had thought about it, way back when he had first came down from Deluxe, unsure that anyone would want a former cadet with Kane's deeds on his hands living in their midst. 

Mike must have known, even then, that he wouldn't be able to do it. He had gotten as far as hitching a ride with a long-haul trucker who had stopped for him, tactfully ignoring his uniform and the KaneCo logo still visible even through the rips and stains. 

It was the first time he'd ever been in a car. Mike remembered the driver shooting him amused looks as he put his hands on the dashboard, feeling the rumble of the engine beneath his hands. 

They got all the way to the edge of town, where the buildings faded out into tangled clumps of wiring and abandoned junkyards, before Mike said that he'd get off there.

"You sure? It's a wide world out there, kid. Kinda crazy and kinda dangerous, but most good things are," the trucker said, gesturing at the inky blackness of ahead.

"I— I should stay," Mike said finally, after looking into the blackness and the sliver of light in the distance. "I've got things to fix."

He remembered the almost-pitying look on the trucker's face, though she hid it by opening up a pouch and rolling a cigarette (another archaism that made Mike boggle a bit). "You can't fix everything, kid," she said finally, rolling the finished cigarette between two fingers. "But you look like the type that's stubborn enough to try. Good luck, huh?"

The truck gave a long blare as it faded away into the darkness.

It was a long walk back to the centre of the city, but he met an old man with a giant monster truck who fed him and gave him a ride back the rest of the way, saying that he was welcome to hang around his place as long as he liked and answering his questions about engines and gears. Mike never really thought about leaving again.

(He did wonder, sometimes, if it would be better, safer for everyone if he just left, given Kane's grudge against him. It seemed selfish, sometimes, to stay, though it also seemed weirdly self-centered to think that Kane wouldn't bother with Motorcity if he was gone. But he knew he couldn't leave forever, now, not even if he tried.) 

"You’re coming too, right, Jules?” Mike said, bumping her shoulder.

"Uh, yeah, of course!" Julie said.

Jacob looked over at her, considering. “Sure you’ll be able to get away from your internship long enough?”

“I’ll manage,” Julie said. She shifted uneasily.

“Hey, Jules, if you’re going to get in trouble for being gone so long, it’s okay, we’ll be fine,” Mike said.

“No,” Julie said fiercely, turning to him. “I’m coming, okay? Besides, there needs to be someone to keep you guys on track.”

Dutch cast a considering eye over their cars. “Man, we’ll have to re-outfit everything for long distances. Beef up the off-road stuff, modify the suspension, maybe add some variable-pressure tires, but also keep the fuel consumption way down...” He trailed off, no doubt planning to strip Whiptail all the way down and rebuild her into a road-devouring marvel. 

Mike grinned. If there was one thing that Dutch couldn’t resist, it was a challenge. (And Roth was already settled in back of Whiptail, firmly determined not to let them leave without him.)

“Mutt needs a trunk,” Chuck chimed in.

“Hey, we’ve got plenty of room!”

"Mike, I'm pretty sure your glove compartment is your trunk," Chuck said.

Okay, so maybe the totally-reasonably-sized glove compartment barely had enough room for a couple of energy bars for Chuck's blood sugar, but it did the job. Really.

Dutch popped open Mutt’s glove compartment. "Oh yeah, that'll totally do. You'll be able to fit, what, a sock and a spare pair of underwear? Briefs, not boxers, though, or they won't fit. And you’ll have to share with Chuck."

"Shh, don't listen to them, baby, they're just being jerks," Mike said, patting Mutt's hood.

“Oh man, what Stronghorn needs is a BARBECUE,” Texas broke in. “Open up the side and wa-POW! Instant bear steaks for everyone! Genius, right?”

“Texas, that’s... well, that’s actually not a bad idea,” Dutch said wonderingly.

“I know,” Texas said sagely. 

“Bear steaks it is, then,” Mike said.

—

Although Dutch did end up installing the barbecue, the amount of food that Jacob was stuffing into all possible crevices of their cars was making Mike wonder if they would even need it.

"Okay, so Dutch and Chuck got the long-distance radio working, so you'll call us if anything happens, right?" Mike said.

"Right," Jacob said, dropping a tupperware container with muffins into the trunk.

"Julie says that there's not much action upstairs, so hopefully there won't be anything, but some of the other guys are standing by if there's an emergency," Mike continued, ticking off the list on his fingers. He was pretty sure he hadn't forgotten anything.

"Right," Jacob said, squeezing another tupperware container into the space formerly occupied by the blaster overflow capacitator, which was now mostly taken up by a water tank.

"Claire should be coming down every so often to give you a heads-up, Deluxe-wise. And Chuck boosted the sensitivity of the gate sensors, so bots should have a harder time sneaking through." 

"Right," Jacob said, stacking a tin-foil-covered lasagne dish on top of the muffins.

"And there's pizza from Antonio's in the freezer, if you get tired of cooking," Mike said. Was he forgetting anything? There had to be something else.

"Mike, if you don't get going, I'm going to stuff the rest of these muffins into your engine and you'll have to deal with the burning okra muffin smell all the way to the coast." Jacob drew him in by the shoulders and gave him a hug. "We'll take good care of this place. She was here long before you were, and she'll do fine without you for a little bit."

"Right," Mike said, hugging Jacob back as hard as he can.

—

"Augh, I'm blind," Chuck said, squinting through the sun. "Pull over, I can’t believe we forgot sun visors.”

It took them awhile to reach the city limits, but sneaking out of the city wasn’t that hard, really—it was just a matter of finding the right tunnels, as usual. 

The sunlight was blinding when they reach the end of the tunnels, nothing like Deluxe's carefully-filtered glow. Once his eyesight adjusted enough to the sun, the sight of Outside was at once completely alien and utterly underwhelming: wild fields stretching out before them as far as the eye can see, the rusted-out carcasses of giant agro-robots scattered around the landscape like sleeping giants. 

The roads were rough and cracked, giant potholes popping up without warning. Chuck softened up the suspension, thank god, and Mutt felt less like she was shaking apart at the seams.

Chuck was navigating by a mix of hacked satellite terrain imaging, old car GPS data from the 2030s that they had scavenged from the junk yards, and a borrowed plastic compass that hung around his neck. The result was a bizarre frankenstein map that Chuck seemed to be modifying on the fly, with little comment boxes saying "not actually a road" and "watch out for farm equipment" and "very, very long flat bit, do not let your car companion sing 99 bottles or risk being tempted to do a spontaneous barrel roll out the car door." Every so often, the computer chirped, "Turn right at next intersection," which was inevitably followed by Chuck saying, "Um, don't actually do that, because I'm pretty sure that road doesn't exist anymore, and we'll plunge straight into a ditch," followed by some recalibration.

They drove on until the end of the day, the flat lines of the horizon leading them on through the fields. Chuck plotted out a course to detour around New Chicago's sprawling tentacles. From here, they could already see the hint of gleaming spires rising up in the distance. 

Mike had never been this far out before, not in a car. He got sent by Kane to New Chicago when he was fifteen or so, as part of a delegation to make an alliance with the new group that currently had its grasp on the higher echelons of the city-state, though they had still been in the middle of a border dispute with the South Republic of Chicago at the time. The city had been a shock to the system after Deluxe's slick white buildings, all chrome and shining towers at the level which they had been greeted. Mike remembered looking out the windows and down the spires, where they stretched further and further, the shine dulling down and messy patches of colour springing from the buildings, stretching across the spires like giant spiderwebs. He remembered wondering.

On the way back in the express pod, he kept on looking down at the tracery of old roads and the patchwork of brown wasteland and struggling yellow fields, trying to be subtle about it. 

"Miserable-looking, isn't it?" One of Kane's ambassadors said. "Good thing we're up here. Here, let me fix that." With a few keystrokes, he summoned up the familiar whiteness of Deluxe, perfectly projected on the walls around them. "Much better." 

"Yeah," Mike had said, feeling cheated, somehow.

They camped out in a field that night, and Mike tilted his seat back and cracked open the roof. He kept on forgetting that weather actually existed out here, but it didn’t seem like it was going to rain, from the signs Jacob told him to watch for. 

Deluxe always boasted about its wide-open skies and perfectly choreographed sunsets—"A view for everyone!", according to the ads— but Mike didn’t ever remember seeing this many stars.

"Chuck— hey, Chuck," he said, reaching over to shake his shoulder.

"What?" Chuck said sleepily, batting his hand away and rolling over in his sleeping bag.

Mike shook him again and pointed up to the sky.

"Oh, hey," Chuck said softly. "That's pretty cool."

It was dark in Motorcity, but it was a different kind of dark than this. There wasn’t a ceiling somewhere up there, safely enclosing the city, and for a moment, Mike felt like he was standing on the edge of some endless void: scary, but really cool.

"I wanted to go up there when I was a kid, you know," Chuck said into the dark. Chuck's voice was usually pretty easy to read, but the words were just a simple statement of fact. Mike didn’t know what to make of it. He looked over at Chuck, but the night was dark and moon-less, and he could only make out the barest outline of Chuck's profile, the warm breeze drifting in through the roof and ruffling his bangs.

"So did I," he offered instead. "I always wanted to go to the Mars colonies. You know, the ones they talk about in old movies? Daring adventurers gone to strike out new frontiers for humankind and all that."

“Ha, yeah. Ruby was saying that she wanted to larp that scenario at some point. Except with more dragon-aliens, which, okay, would be kind of awesome,” Chuck said. 

“Whoa, count me in,” Mike said, because yeah, that did sound awesome.

Chuck licked his lips, the night air dry and cool. “I read somewhere that it took them, like, five months to get there. It’s already going to take us a little under two to get to the coast and back.” He paused. “If everything goes well and we aren’t maimed horribly.”

“Makes Mars seem not that far away, huh?”

“I was gonna say that it makes the coast seem that much freaking further away, but yeah, that works too.” 

Chuck was grinning, though, and that was good. Mike patted his arm, and fell asleep with meteors silently streaking through the darkness.

They got woken up a little early the next morning when a robo-thresher passed right over their cars, almost clipping Mutt's antenna.

"Auuuuuuuuuugh," said Chuck.

"Okay! We'll grab breakfast on the road, guys," Mike said, peeling off and narrowly avoiding another pothole as he swerved around the robo-thresher's legs. Mutt jerked forward when his foot slipped off the clutch too quickly, his feet still tangled up in his sleeping bag. The robo-threshers weren’t dangerous, not like the robots Kane sent after them, but Mike fancied that it probably wasn’t a good idea to get tangled up with the threshing part.

As they drove away, the robo-thresher trundled on through the fields behind them, the hiccupy whirring of its engine drowned out by Mutt’s growl. Roth waved goodbye from the back of Whiptail.

—

Mike was pretty glad they hadn’t had to dispense any bear-punchings so far, but apparently all the stories about Outside had omitted the fact that miles and miles of Outside were also deadly boring. Like, really, really boring. Seriously, who even knew that you could have this much stuff growing in one place?

Maybe they should’ve wrangled the robo-thresher into a robo-thresher friend, just for kicks.

"Bingo!" Texas said. "Man, it's tough being this good at this game. Okay, who wants to play red car?""

"Texas. You can't play red car when there's all of two cars on the road for five hundred miles," Dutch said. Mike couldn’t see him, but he probably had his hand on his face.

"It's okay, Dutch. Not everyone can be as awesome at red car as I am," Texas said comfortingly. 

There was silence over the comm for about a few moments as the GPS beeped and told them to turn down Main Road, which Mike interpreted as a direction to follow the less-overgrown fork in the road.

"I spy with my little eye something that starts with... R," Julie said.

"Rock!" Chuck said.

"Bingo. I spy with my little eye... something else that starts with R."

"...Rrrrrrock?" Texas said.

"Yep."

"I am, without a doubt, in some as-of-yet-undiscovered layer of hell," Dutch said. "I spy with my little eye—" 

“HEY. YEAH, YOU, THE GREEN MOTHERFUCKER.”

The first person they met—well, it wasn’t really a person, per se, but it counted. Mike raised his eyebrows and shifted down a few gears, letting Mutt slow down a bit.

“DON’T YOU ROLL YOUR EYES AT ME DUDE.”

Mike turned to Chuck, slowly coasting to a halt. “...Can you hear that?”

“Loud and clear,” Chuck said, already pulling up screens.

“SERIOUSLY YOU’D BETTER STOP YOUR ENGINES OR I SWEAR TO GOD YOU ARE IN FOR SO MUCH TROUBLE YOUNG MAN OR LADY. WHICHEVER, MAN, I DON’T REALLY CARE.”

Mike looked around. They were in the middle of another totally unremarkable field. “Guys, are you getting anything?”

“I’m gettin’ that there someone out there that’s asking for a Texas special, man!” Texas said. 

“Let’s stick to diplomacy, for now,” Julie said. “We can serve up the special later.”

“Are we trespassing on somebody’s turf?” Dutch said. “Didn’t see any tags. Hey, Roth, calm down, it’s cool.”

“Whoever they are, they’re a jerk, man,” Mike said, leaning out the window to scan the fields around them. Whoever it was, they had apparently evolved some kind of crazy grass-chameleon superpowers, too.

“YOU’RE A JERK, JERK. COME AND SAY THAT TO MY FACE.”

“Did you hear that? Come on, I have someone’s face to go talk to!” Texas said.

“Wait a sec, let’s just see where this signal is even coming from—“ Julie said.

“It’s a security system,” Chuck cut in. 

“WHO YOU CALLIN’ A SECURITY SYSTEM.”

“Hey, open the roof,” Chuck said. He popped his head over the edge and stretched out his hand to Mike. “Hand me those binoculars, will you?”

“ARE YOU IGNORING ME YOU PUNK.”

Chuck pointed off in the distance. “Over there—that shack.”

Mike led the way through the field, following Chuck’s lead, until the grass parted around a low shack. He pushed open the door, sneezing as a dust drifted through the door. It was a small room, electronics neatly stacked and topped with figurines and knick-knacks. It was a comfortable, well-loved kind of place, like the kind that tended to belong to some of the older people in Motorcity who had been there for ages. There was an empty teacup resting by a terminal, a spoon resting in the saucer, as if someone had just stepped out for a moment to get some sugar.

“Uh, hi?” Mike said.

“HI YOURSELF DOUCHEBAG.” From inside the room, the voice was small and tinny.

Mike looked over at Julie. Julie shrugged. 

“Can we pass on through? We’re just headed west, so we won’t give you any trouble.” Mike wasn’t sure how you could give the remnants of a security system trouble when it didn’t have anything left to protect, but it was the principle of the thing. 

“YEAH SURE. JUST WANTED TO MAKE SURE YOU WEREN’T UP TO ANYTHING.” Mike wasn’t sure if computer systems could sound confused, but there was a note of hesitation, as if it wasn’t quite sure what to do, now that it had stopped them.

“Okay, great,” Mike felt as if they should tidy up or something, while they were there. “Anything we can do for you?” he ventured, instead.

“IS THIS THE PART WHERE I SPILL OUT THAT I’M THE SAD REMNANT OF SOME DUDE’S CONSCIOUSNESS LIVING OUT ITS DAYS IN THE MIDDLE OF BUTTFUCK NOWHERE?”

Mike blinked. “I guess? Not that I want to judge. You seem to be doing okay.”

“I’M SO LONELY, DUDE. NAH, I’M JUST MESSIN’ WITH YOU. FUCK OFF, MAN. TWINKIES IN THE CUPBOARD TO YOUR LEFT. ”

Mike saluted the box. “You too.”

Sure enough, there were twinkies in the cupboard—not even stale. Chuck added another comment box to the map: “inhospitable security system, may possibly take over world at some point, has good twinkies.”

—

All the way across the plains, they were alone, though a giant tricked-out rig crossed them at one point, pulling its multiple horns: a long, deep sound that resonated through Mike's bones. 

This far out from the cities, the former cultivated fields started thinning out, yielding to thick prairie carpets to the horizon. The radio signals from New Chicago faded out too, cutting out into static. Mike kept the radio on, though, the volume low and scanning the frequencies. Every so often, they ran across snatches of old music transmitted by someone out in the sea of grass, scratchy and weak, but still there.

There was a thunderhead building in the distance, a massive bulk that hung over the long lines of the horizon and rose up as if holding up the green-tinged sky like the cables back home. It rained that day: big, fat drops that splattered across Mutt’s windshield and coursed over it in lines, washing away the dust, and it got too bad to see in a matter of minutes.

Mike pulled over to the side of the road. “I’m gonna stop, guys. I can’t see a darn thing.”

Chuck looked out at the storm, his fingers spread over the window. “Heh, we really did forget the most basic things, huh? Sun visors, windshield wipers.” 

Both of them jumped as a fork cracked across the windshield. Mike grinned sheepishly. Somehow, that was way different than tangling with the climator. The sky above was grey and dark, the heavy weight of it pressing down and crashing down around them.

Chuck played with the radio as the storm dragged on. The next station he caught cut in and out, but it had an actual DJ and everything: "—Okay, all you crash queens and—time to—make some noise—"

"I could probably triangulate it," Chuck said meditatively, listening to the opening strains of a guitar solo fade out again in another crash of thunder, but his hands didn’t move to his keyboard. 

Dutch's voice filtered out over the comm, soft and low, singing something to which Mike didn’t know the words, until the rain drummed harder against Mutt’s roof, drowning out everything.

When the rain stopped, it left a fresh, green smell of wet earth that Mike usually associated with Jacob’s plants. Mike got out of the car and took his boots off, and wiggled his toes into the dirt, gritty and muddy and tactile, listening to the slow drip of water off of Mutt’s spoilers.

(Texas tackled him into the mud a few seconds after.)

—

The fuel efficiency modifications that Jacob and Dutch had worked out before leaving worked way better than any of them had expected, and the landscape was already starting to sprout thick covers of trees before they had to start thinking about stopping for gas. 

Before they could aim for the nearest place Jacob had given them, though, there was a river to cross. 

“I don’t think I recommend fording it,” Chuck said, pixelated oxen hanging in the air in front of him. "We just lost a hundred and ten pounds of meat and fourteen boxes of ammo in a river crossing."

"Whoa, we're kind of unlucky, aren't we?"

"And apparently, we're all going to die of dysentery. Except for Texas. He just got bitten by a snake."

“Make that really unlucky.”

The first bridge they found was washed out, crumbled concrete and girders propped up in the river. 

Texas poked a stick into the river authoritatively, and pronounced it totally good to cross, if they could find a ramp to do a really sweet twister jump. Unfortunately, the remnants of the bridge didn’t have the right angle, or Mike would’ve totally given it a try. Chuck sighed in relief and plotted out a course to find a bridge that looked halfway reliable. 

The river was wide and deep, though it might have been even higher before, judging by the banks. There was a certainty in its lazy, winding way, and Mike wondered what they would find if they followed it down to the sea. 

As luck—or maybe careful planning—would have it, when they finally found their crossing, they also found their gas station, right next to the river. 

The thing about getting gas was that anyone who left not only Deluxe, but also Motorcity was— well, anyone who lived this far out of the cities was bound to be a bit strange. And gas station attendants especially: all chemists of varying degrees of Mad Scientist with home-engineered chemical synthesis labs, making your fuel mix for you in exchange for whatever goodies you had on hand, usually with assorted sidelines like repairs and road food, too. 

"A couple of them are old friends of mine!" Jacob had said, giving them old-fashioned paper printouts of the fuel compound structures. "Just give 'em these and tell them that it's a three to one ratio. Oh, and make sure that they give you the right configuration for that chiral point. Wait, let me give you some muffins to give to Lupe, she'll be sure to love you for it—"

Gas stations were few and far between, and they probably wouldn’t have the exact jury-rigged fuel blend that your particular car was using. Between their four cars alone, Mike was pretty sure that they had four completely different fuels, mostly recycled and synthesized from whatever was lying around Motorcity; Jacob once said that he could tell exactly what part of the city someone was from by their fuel mix. Mutt was well-equipped to run on other sources, if necessary, but she always ran best on her particular mix (even though Mike was pretty sure part of that mix was processed from Jacob's kitchen leftovers). 

It was still a bit of a shock when they knocked on the door of a neat little log cabin and nearly got swarmed by a pack of cats. They weren’t like any cats Mike has ever seen before—not nearly as ornery as the ones in Motorcity, and fluffy, and cute as hell. Julie’s eyes just about bugged out of her head.

(Chuck manfully held back a scream and locked himself in the car.)

“Back! Back, you fiends,” a woman said, scooping up a bundle of striped fluff that was steadily making its way up Mike’s pants leg. “Sorry, it’s been awhile since anyone’s stopped by. What can I do for you guys?” 

Mike sneezed, and he grinned at her. “Um, fill ‘er up, I guess?”

As soon as they mentioned Jacob, Lupe’s face cracked into a grin, and it was all Mike could do to convince her that they were only staying a couple days—long enough to synthesize the fuel—and that they really couldn’t impose on her much longer than that, much as they would like to.

“Nonsense,” she said. “Don’t get many ‘round these parts. Settle in. Stay awhile.”

They stayed longer than the few days they had planned, helping out around Lupe’s place and hearing stories about Jacob when he was young (wow, did Lupe ever have blackmail material), cradled by the forest and the rushing of the river. 

Along with the cats, Lupe had these big, patient animals that she called cows, who tolerated Mike clumsily tugging at their udders with Lupe’s guidance. Mike liked their long-lashed, wet eyes. Milk was delicious, rich and mild, and completely unlike anything he had tasted before, especially when it was sipped while sitting on the banks of the river, his feet dangling in the cool water. 

By the time they left, Julie had a pack of cat devotees, and Chuck had almost worked up to petting the tiniest kitten.

— 

Gas attendants weren’t the only weird people out here, though. Whatever ‘weird’ was, world's biggest ball of twine definitely qualified.

"Man, it used to be only fifteen feet tall, apparently," Chuck said, nose in the guidebook.

It was kind of hard to miss it, now, considering it was about half a mile tall.

“And was pretty much the only attraction for Cawker City, Kansas.” Chuck's big hands turned the page to _The Guidebook to the United States_ with exaggerated care. ("It's what this part of Pan-America used to be called," he clarified when Texas looked puzzled.) 

Mike glanced over at the page—Chuck had apparently got it from the retro-librarian a few blocks down from the garage, the one with actual paper books. 

Chuck curled around the book protectively. "She'll kill me if I rip something, Mikey, I'm not even kidding!"

"How did she even let you take it out of her sight?" Mike said. "Seriously, it's got to be what, around a hundred years old?"

"Lots of dire threats. Oh, and she made us to promise to write notes for a new guidebook," Julie said, pulling up Chuck's franken-map. "Chuck, what's this bit here about 'lots of rocks. comfortingly boring. avoid eye-spy.’?"

“Really important info,” Chuck said. “Trust me.”

“What do they say about the twine ball, apart from the fact that it was, uh, way more reasonably-sized at some point?” Dutch asked.

“Um, not much, really.”

Needless to say, it was a kind of surprising when a man in a green toga appeared from behind the ball and welcomed them to the Community of the Sphere of Wonder.

“Sphere... of Wonder. Right,” Mike repeated slowly.

“We have devoted our lives to ensure the continuance of this holy artefact,” the dedicate said, gesturing up at the impossible bulk of it.

“So do you... live inside the twine ball?” Texas said, squinting doubtfully at its curve rising above them and giving the ball an experimental kick.

The dedicate restrained a look of horror at unbelievers profaning the Most Holy Craft Project, succeeding mostly in looking like a small animal had just ran up his leg and inside his toga. Texas didn’t notice, being already occupied with seeing if he could move the ball.

In the interests of diplomacy, Mike put a hand on Texas’s shoulder to suggest that this plan should maybe go in the back pocket.

“Our living quarters are underground,” the dedicate said, regaining control of his expression. “Would you care to join us for our evening repast?”

“If that means food, then heck, yes!” Texas said, abandoning his attempt to get the ball rolling across the Midwest and into Yellowstone crater in world’s most over-sized game of mini-golf. (The dedicate looked enormously relieved.)

“Evening repast” apparently involved a lot of root vegetables from the underground fields and some truly inspired deep-frying, and they left the next morning with more leftovers stuffing Jacob’s tupperware, the dedicates waving at them, dwarfed by their giant, impractical, amazing creation. Chuck added another star to their maps with the label “eccentric string ball sect, amazing fries.”

—

Every so often, they found ghost towns, abandoned long ago when everyone started moving to the mega-cities after everything blew. Mike ought to find them eerie, the skeletons of old lives grown over with grass, but there was something comforting about them that resembled the rusted-out buildings back home, something that said, yes, we're gone, but we're not dead.

All along the road, there were broken-down signs indicating burgers at the next exit, fireworks just off the I-94, old half-illegible signs from a time long past. Someone occasionally voiced a thought to the effect of “oh man, burgers sound so good right now,” but it was a wishful thing, not something that any of them would actually pursue.

Well, except for one time, when Texas said, “OH MAN,” and veered off the highway at the next shambles of an exit, disappearing into a fray of grass.

“Texas!” Julie said, following him, “Where are you going? Oh, dammit, let’s go, guys.”

It wasn’t until Texas screeched to a halt in front of a once-cheerfully-coloured sign that he clarified.

“Mini-golf, guys. MINI-GOLF.”

Over the comm, Mike heard a long honk as Julie leaned her head on her steering rig.

Texas kicked down the half-rotted door to a shed and emerged triumphant with five putters held aloft. “Yes! Okay, guys, I’ll even give you a handicap and everything so that you won’t be too intimidated by Texas’s kung-fu mini golf swing.”

How hard could it be. “I get green,” Mike said. “You’re going to have to explain the rules, though.”

“Okay, it’s been awhile since my sis taught me, but don’t worry, Texas has got a mind like a steel trap.”

Mini-golf apparently involved a lot more interpretative dance and poetry about tigers than Mike had previously suspected, and the windmill thing was actually his second-worst nemesis. He was pretty sure he had sprained something trying to whack the ball out of the tall grass after rebounding off the darn wings for the fifth time in a row. 

(Roth beat them all, in the end.

“Does he have secret mini-golf powers?” Texas whispered loudly.

Dutch looked both completely bewildered and smug. “Naw, man, he’s just that good.”)

Texas returned all the putters to the shed afterwards, lining them up carefully for the next person passing through. 

—

They checked over their cars every night to make sure things were working properly, because pushing their cars to the next garage would be—well, kind of a challenge, to say the least. There was always the unpredictable, though, like blowouts from the rough road, or the air conditioning in Mutt breaking in the middle of absolutely nowhere (or, well, more absolutely nowhere than usual). Which was absolutely terrible for everyone involved.

"...Are you driving naked?" Julie asked, pulling up beside them at the plant-invaded remains of Otto's Roadside Diner.

"Not completely!" Mike protested, leveraging himself out of the driver's seat and grimacing at the feeling of his sweaty skin peeling off the seat. "Okay, so maybe this wasn’t the best idea ever."

Chuck flopped out of the passenger seat. "Mike. Mike, don’t take it personally, but I think I might hitch a ride in Stronghorn.”

Texas honked his horn. “Paaaaarty car! Good choice, Chuck.”

Dutch popped the hood open and glanced inside. “Well, can’t do anything about it right now! It’ll have to wait ‘till the next stop where we can find parts,” he said cheerfully. “Hey, as long as you can’t cook an egg on your dash, it’ll be fine.”

“I appreciate your support in these trying times, guys,” Mike said. 

They filled up their water tanks at the next river they saw, and Mike dunked himself in, floating in the water and thinking wistfully of the constant coolness of Motorcity. 

He dived under and swam towards the bank where Julie was sitting. And tugged on her feet, because there were some temptations that were impossible to resist, especially when Julie yanked her feet out of the water and shrieked. 

“Oh, you jerk,” she said, hitting him on the shoulder as he sat up on the bank, spluttering and laughing.

“They were right there! I couldn’t not.” Mike peeked over Julie’s shoulder, trying his best not to drip all over her. “Whatcha doing?”

“Writing postcards,” Julie said, flicking his wet hair out of his face.

“To who?”

Julie looked sheepish. “For Claire, since she couldn’t come with us. It’s kind of silly— sending them back by the pony express thing they’ve got going out here would take pretty much as long as coming back, so I guess I’m just going to hand them right over to her directly, which kind of defeats the purpose of the thing.”

Mike leaned back on his arms and smiled at her. “Hey, I think it totally counts! You’ve written a lot, too.” Maybe he should write something for Jacob. He had never been much of a writer, but Jacob might like them.

Julie brightened. “Yeah, it’s mostly just cool stuff I’m finding out here—look at this beach postcard— isn’t it wild? Think she’ll like it?”

The people had faded to an unnatural blue, but they were still grinning and holding up drinks, and more people were sprawled on the beach in the background, with barely a sliver of sand showing through the bath towels and parasols. ‘Wish you were here,’ it said. 

“I’m sure she’ll love it,” Mike said.

“Good,” Julie said, carefully tucking the postcard back into a thick envelope.

They finally found a replacement part after a few days of sweating—though by the end, Mike had perfected a driving technique that involved hanging his head out the window occasionally and, yeah, okay, driving mostly naked. Texas joined him in solidarity and Chuck decided that he might ride with Dutch, instead.

The increasingly-convoluted references from contact to contact eventually got them to a negotiation with a door—or well, notes slipped under the door of a house, which, after a good half-hour of making sure that they weren’t a threat, finally pointed them to a car yard a few miles off with specific directions as to which vehicle to cannibalize. 

It was weird, how much you had to trust out here. Motorcity had a bit of that, too—you had to stick together, or you didn’t know where you would get your next meal from, or who would hook up your electricity to the cables. You could do the lone-wolf thing, sure, but it was just way easier to find yourself a group of people where you could help out. But out here, there was only so far you could go before things broke down—and then what? You needed other people, whether you liked it or not.

Most of all, no one liked being alone.

—

When they were planning out their route, Dutch had taken one look and the map and said, "Guys, I personally vote for sticking north. I mean, I kind of prefer to avoid giant deserts that probably still glow at night, but that's just me." 

Chuck roughly aligned the radiation data stream from the satellite over his map. It was kind of a shaky connection at the best of times—who knew when the thing dated from—but it was still pretty clear. "Yyyyeah, that does sound like a good idea," he said, watching a bright red cloud slowly swirl over the southwest.

Thing was, as Dutch pointed out—that still left them with a giant crater to deal with. (“Caldera,” Jacob had corrected absentmindedly.) The Yellowstone eruption had been a pretty long time ago, but some of the older folk still told stories about it. 

“What do you think it’ll be like?” Mike had asked Jacob. 

Jacob shrugged. “It’s been awhile. Might just look like a big valley, by now. I’m pretty sure you’ll know it when you see it, though.”

Mike was pretty sure they’d found it when the road suddenly ended, a chunk of tarmac dangling off the edge of a gigantic bowl that stretched to the horizon.

"Whoa," he said, for lack of a better thing to say.

"AWESOME."

"Mike, if you say we're going out on the giant supervolcanic caldera that might still cooling down since the last eruption, I swear to god, I am jumping out of this car now and walking back home and I will be eaten by mutant bears and it will all be your fau—"

Mike nudged Mutt over the edge of the crater, and Julie followed right behind him, whooping over the comm.

They camped at the edge of the crater that night, avoiding the two-headed buffalo roaming around as best they could. Texas perked up when Mike started building a fire that night—it was still kind of weird to do it in a firepit instead of an oil drum, but it worked out pretty well. They’d gotten marshmallows from a guy they had passed on the road, who insisted that they had totally missed out on a vital part of camping if they hadn’t roasted marshmallows.

“Oh man, we totally have to tell scary stories," Texas said, rubbing his hands together and admiring their fire. (It was a pretty good fire, Mike had to say, even if Texas had gotten a bit enthusiastic during the process.)

“Uh, sure! Know any good ones?” Texas was really, really bad at scary stories, since they mostly seemed to end with "But then I punched the ghost in the face and everything was awesome." 

Julie rolled her eyes and said, "Really, guys, ghost stories?" She frowned suddenly. "Actually, that kind of reminds me about this story I heard about something that happened in a lab— it was a long time ago, like, before Deluxe, back when they were trying to clone mutations out of people..."

Chuck leaned in towards Julie, pushing his bangs out his eyes. "Wait, I heard about that one, too. Found the files for it, even. Who did you hear it from? Those files were super-hard to get to, seriously." Mike looked over at him. Chuck was serious, his eyes fixed on Julie.

"I don't remember, if I'm honest— I think it must have been one of the guys I work with. He's been around for awhile."

She went on, and Mike didn’t realize that he was leaning into her words until he felt Chuck clutching at his shirt. Roth and Texas were kind of half in Dutch's lap by now, Texas’s marshmallow completely forgotten and on the brink of falling off into the fire, but Dutch totally didn’t notice, leaning in closer to hear Julie better.

"And the clone said— guys, what are you looking at?" Julie said, dropping her hands, her eyes widening.

"Mikey—" Chuck said, tugging at his sleeve. " _Mikey, what's that behind you,_ " he said more urgently, his voice shaking.

There was this presence at his shoulder, he realized, something breathing in the shadows thrown by the fire. He tried not to move, but there was a dark curtain of hair in his peripheral vision, and Mike spun around, pulling out his staff, adrenaline pumping through his veins. He was half-blinded by the brightness of the fire, and his eyes couldn’t adjust fast enough. "Holy freaking crap, what—get behind me, guys—"

Texas bellowed and Dutch clutched onto him, not quite screaming, but close.

And then the darkness cleared, and Julie combed her hair out of her face and smirked. "Gotcha!"

The sitting-down Julie shimmered out into thin air, and Chuck gave Julie a high-five, giggling.

"You guys are jerks, oh my god. Way to give me a heart attack," Mike said with feeling. clutching at his chest. He couldn’t help smiling, though.

Texas patted Dutch on the shoulder. “Yeah, I knew it. I just didn’t want to spoil it for you guys. Totally didn’t almost scream or anything. Nope. Not Texas. It’s okay, Dutch, you can cling on to my massive biceps to make it all better.”

Dutch rolled his eyes. “My hero.” He shifted out of Texas’s space, but handed him another marshmallow to replace the one that had fallen prey to the fire during the story.

Texas made the executive decision that they were done with horror stories, roping Dutch and Roth into a round of Journey (everyone pretty much knew the lyrics by now, whether they liked it or not). Julie looked thoughtful, though, looking into the fire and twisting her fingers together. Mike scooted closer to her, nudging her. "Man, you got me good. A-plus teamwork, there."

"Yeah, it was pretty good, eh?" Julie said.

"Whatcha thinking about?" Mike said when Julie went silent again.

"Nothing," she said automatically. 

Mike nudged her again, and she reached out a hard to balance herself.

"I'm trying to remember other scary stories I knew when I was a kid," she said, finally. "Can you think of any?"

Mike shrugged. "Not really. I wasn't really one for scary stories."

Julie nodded and stared into the fire, and then at their cars behind them. "All the others I can think of were about Motorcity. The one about the giant mutant rats that ate your fingers during the night. The one about the serial killer who sneaks up from Motorcity and hides in the air ducts. The one about the — anyways, you get the idea."

Mike poked at the fire, propping up another log. “We need new stories, huh?”

Julie laughed. “Yeah.”

—

Mike struggled awake, feeling a hand on his shoulder, shaking him. "Mike. Mikey," Chuck said, a frantic edge to his voice. There was a beeping sound at the edge of Mike's hearing, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

"Mike. We need to move," Chuck said. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but we have to move fast, right now." 

Mike sat up in his sleeping bag, rubbing at his face. They’d slept outside, and there was the barest breeze ruffling his hair. He rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes, trying to get half-awake, at least. It was still pitch-dark, though there was the barest edge of blue dawn at the distance. Everyone else was slowly stirring, wondering what was going on. 

Mike froze. The beeping.

"That's the geiger counter," he said, suddenly wide awake, and Chuck nodded his head frantically.

"The only data I can get is about half an hour old, but it must be a dust storm coming from the south, and it's red-hot, and we're right at the edge of it." Chuck’s voice was strained, panic seizing his throat in its clasp. From Chuck, it was worse than screaming.

Mike's fingers went cold. "Okay. Okay, let's go, now."

They were silent as they packed up the campsite, as if there was something slumbering in the darkness, something they could avoid waking if they were quiet enough, fast enough. They peeled off the side of the road and ran.

It was only when Chuck pulled up his map to check the progress of the storm that Mike’s stomach seized. 

"Oh god," Mike said, his fingers clenching on the steering wheel. "Chuck. What about those people." He glanced over at the map, at the cheery star markers indicating the people they had met. "Should we go back?"

Chuck bit his lip, running a hand through his hair. He was silent for a long moment. "And— and do what, Mike? We can't beat this thing, can't drive it away."

It was true, but Mike couldn’t help but glance back out the window, expecting a wall of dust to sweep up behind them, eclipsing the light at the edge of the horizon.

"They live out here, so I'm sure they must have something to deal with the storms," Chuck said tentatively. "Those people were pretty prepared."

"Yeah. Yeah, okay."

They drove through the night, chased by a danger they couldn’t even see. There was no chatter over the comm, and Chuck was silent and tense beside him, the satellite data overlaid on his map, watching the noxious red cloud reach up towards them. The storm would leave that part of the land fallow for another few years.

Mike knew what it felt like to fight against something bigger and more powerful, but this was something else: something that you couldn’t even reason with, that didn’t hate or fear, but just was. 

He pressed the pedal down and ran faster. 

—

Chuck kept a close eye on the radar for the next few days, but the storm gradually receded, fading back to the southwest, which kept its usual red glow. Mike tried not to think too hard about it. It took them a few days to get back in the rhythm of things, but they eventually stopped driving on past sunset as if they felt something snapping at their heels.

The days faded together on the road, one day at a time. Where to find the next fuel station, the next place to stop for water, where to sleep that night. Every day in Motorcity was another day that Kane hadn’t brought the whole city down on them, but out here—another day was another turn down the road, at once new and familiar. They had a place to go, but they could stop by the side of the road because Dutch had seen a building that he wanted to sketch or because Julie wanted to scavenge a postcard from the shambles of a tourist gift shop.

Every so often, on the long stretches of nothing, Mike found himself thinking about back home, wondering if everything was all right, if the Duke was stirring up any trouble with them gone, if there was anything he could bring back for Jacob. 

The mountains seemed like an illusion when they rose up before them: some kind of massive hologram on an unprecedented scale, built by some dude with little else to do but fashion giant landscape art. Hey, given the people they’d met out here, it wasn’t entirely out of the question.

Still, they got closer and closer, and the mountains never faded out into pixels.

They stopped at a roadside cafe in the foothills, where an old couple argued amiably about the best way to cross the range. “You’re right in the crossing season, so you’ll be okay, no matter which way you want to go,” Kyouko said in the end, cutting across Sybil’s objection. “Snow won’t start until two months or so—can’t smell a hint of it yet. Sybil can give you something properly scientific to back that up, though. Best not to underestimate those mountains, though. They can give you trouble, no matter what time of year. You run into any trouble, you turn right back around and head back here, all right?”

The pass through the mountains was well-kept, compared to some of the rough patches of road that they’d encountered. It didn’t make the mountains any smaller, though—they climbed, and climbed, and there were still more road rising up before them. Mike had trouble catching his breath when he scrambled up to the highest point he could find and looked out to the places they had come from, as if he couldn’t breathe hard enough to fill his lungs. The clouds above had never seemed so close.

And after the crest, a line of blue, far in the distance. 

—

The ocean was nothing like anything Mike had ever seen. The lake back home faded off into darkness, lapping gently on the shore of the city, while the ocean was all crashing waves and endless blue, sunlight glancing off the waves and salty wind grabbing at his hair.

There was just so much of it, so much space and so many unknown things. He had seen the maps and the pictures, and he knew that there was even more beyond the bounds of the horizon, but the ocean stretched so far that it was almost hard to imagine. Mike shaded his eyes and tried to see further, but the horizon and the water met and became indistinguishable, as if you could drive right on up into the sky if you went far enough and fast enough. 

Texas dragged Chuck into trying surfing, which failed hilariously, partly because they were trying to use one of Texas's spoilers as a surfboard, and partly because all of them only had the vaguest idea of how surfing worked. Dutch seemed pretty confident that they could engineer something that worked well enough, eventually, though he suggested that adding a motor to the back might be the best solution.

They stayed a couple of days by the beach, spinning their tires in the sand and racing down its stretch, making fires in the evenings and watching the flame ripple far over the water. None of them mentioned the end of the road. 

Finally, they pulled up to the coordinates. Chuck counted down the miles, the sound of his voice tinged with awe as they pulled up to an old, white slat-wood house and he said, “That’s it. We’re here.”

Mike stared at the little home, similar to so many others out here, at the fruit trees growing in the front yard, branches bent with the weight of lemons. He leaned over and pulled the package out of the glove compartment, weighing it in his hands. It seemed heavier, somehow, than the package he had taken from Rayon’s hands. “Who wants to do the honours?”

Julie got out of her car, shaking the miles out of her legs. “Go ahead, fearless leader.” 

Mike looked over at Texas and Dutch, who waved him up the steps. 

A little old woman answered the door, her lined brown face alert, but welcoming. “Yes?”

Mike felt weirdly shy, struck all over again by the absurdity of driving all the way across the country for a package. “This is for you,” he said, for a lack of anything else to say. “Um, I don’t know if you have to sign for it or something. If we’re in the wrong place, we’re in a spot of trouble, so I hope it’s you! Oh, it’s from Rayon, from Motorcity—Detroit, you know—that’s where we’re from.”

The old woman bore his babbling with a curious smile, but when he got to Rayon and Chuck nudged him with a fond look to get him to stop, her face lit up. “Lit up” seemed insufficient, somehow: she was dignified and understated in her joy, but the widening of her eyes and the deepening of her smile wrinkles at the sides of her mouth made Mike feel like he had swallowed a small sun, its warmth and light radiating through his insides and making his fingertips tingle.

“Yes,” she said, at last, “That would be my boy. Come on in, there’s no sense in standing out on the porch like a bunch of awkward chickens. You must be thirsty after coming all this way.”

She served them lemonade (with the distinct burn of gin) in a neat living room, unadorned and simple, and asked them how the road had been. 

When she opened the package, there was a bundle of letters. One for every month, the old woman said fondly, her fingertips tracing the neatly-pressed ridges of paper. Words and words and words and time.

—

It seemed almost anticlimactic, now, to just turn around and go back.

Mike flopped down in the sand and looked out at the ocean one more time. 

Julie sat down beside him, watching Texas chase Dutch and Chuck into the water, Roth hovering over the crests of the waves. The ocean had calmed, rippling and slowly creeping down the beach, as if opening up before them to lead them on. 

He still hadn’t found something to bring back to Jacob. He had thought about asking for lemons from the garden, but they wouldn’t keep long enough. 

“You could stay, you know. Make a new life out here,” Julie said, after awhile. She had taken off her shoes, and she dug her toes into the sand, making ridges and tracing paths that curved back onto themselves aimlessly.

He glanced over at her. “Could you?”

She ducked her head, smiling, and smoothed out the sand with the flat of her foot. “Guess not.”

“Yeah.” And that was it, wasn’t it. Simple as that.

Chuck sat down beside him—at his right, like always—and nudged him. “Ready?”

Mike got up, dusting the sand off his pants. “Yeah. Ready.”

—

They came back to the road, and Chuck hung his hand out the window, riding the currents of air rushing by. By now, the sun was setting behind them, the long shadows of their cars stretching ahead. 

Nothing but the sky above and the tarmac below, broken, faded yellow lines leading them back home.


End file.
